Businesses that want not just to survive but also thrive in the 21st-century market need a website.
Step 1 to making your website go live on the Internet? Get hosting.
- But what type of hosting?
- Will shared hosting work?
- What is virtual private hosting and should you get that?
- Why is there so much buzz around cloud hosting?
Most business owners feel that the choice of hosting is a purely technical decision and something that their IT heads are responsible for.
Well, your hosting greatly affects your website’s speed, performance, security, and accessibility too. Thus, ultimately having an impact on search engine rankings too.
So today, we will be talking about the SEO effect of the hosting that you choose.
Why?
Getting your website live won’t do good for your business until the website shows up in search results and visitors come to the site. Search Engine Optimization makes it possible.
And the type of hosting you choose affects SEO. In this blog, we will be talking in detail about cloud hosting and its SEO impact.
Before we begin, let’s understand the basics of cloud hosting.
What is cloud hosting?
A server is a physical system that hosts your website and makes it available to the users. Now when your website is called from location X and your server is at location Y, it takes some time for the server to respond.
Now imagine the physical web hosting server being split up and placed at different locations. This process is what we technically call virtualization. These data centers (where the split-up servers are located) make your website more accessible. From anywhere in the world.
So simply stated, cloud hosting is one of the many types of web hosting where you have multiple servers located at different places. All the servers are equally important and there is no primary or backup server.
This increases the speed and accessibility of your website, which ultimately has an effect on your site’s SEO.
Below we have elaborated upon 3 key search engine optimization advantages of cloud hosting for your website.
3 SEO benefits of cloud hosting for your website
1. Better website speed and performance
Google considers 200+ parameters for ranking websites. One of the most important parameters among those is website speed.
Fast-loading websites have a definitive edge over their slow-loading counterparts. Moreover, even people like websites that load quickly. In fact, people expect websites to load within 2 seconds or less. Thus, when your site loads faster, people are less likely to bounce off without interacting with it. This also increases your engagement metrics, which further signals to Google that your site is worth ranking higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Among the many ways you can boost your site speed, cloud hosting is the simplest and foremost way. Cloud hosting is faster than traditional hosting because the servers are located in various locations.
So say, someone tries to access your website from the UK. Then your cloud’s UK-based server will respond and the site will load quickly. With traditional hosting, the website fetch and load speed might have been lower given that you have only 1 physical server located in India, for example.
Thus, cloud hosting positively impacts your website’s speed and thus, contributes to SEO.
2. Low website downtime
As mentioned earlier, the whole concept of cloud hosting revolves around the fact that one physical server is broken down by the process of virtualization and the server is split between various geographically distant data centers.
This directly results in lower downtimes for your website. How? Let’s understand this with an example.
No matter how technically stable your data center is, issues happen and servers go down sometimes. Now if your website’s server goes down, it means your website’s visitors are not able to access your website.
This increases the bounce rate which negatively affects rankings. Also, if your website is down often, Google might lower the rank of your website and in extreme, situations, your website might also get deindexed for having enough uptime.
That won’t happen with cloud hosting. Why? Because with cloud hosting, even if one of your servers is down, your website will remain up because it can be fetched from other servers. This reduces downtime and this saves you from negative SEO outcomes.
3. Better website security
Cloud hosting runs through virtual and geographically isolated machines. This means that if the virtualization software is properly configured, the system is more secure than traditional hosting.
Also, issues with one of the servers won’t cause your website to go down, which means your site will stay secure.
Better website security helps your SEO cause because Google gives preference to websites that are more secure. In fact, Google is known for flagging insecure sites and letting users know that.
Taking the first step today
Now that you have understood the SEO advantages of cloud hosting for your website, it is time to take the first step toward building an SEO-friendly website.
But getting just cloud hosting is not enough. To actually get asymmetric SEO advantages over competitors, you need dedicated SEO services. And guess what, you are in luck. SynergyTop has a team of SEO professionals who can curate a custom SEO plan for your website and yield guaranteed results. Plus, we have experts in various technologies too, who can offer 360-degree digital marketing services like social media optimization, paid marketing, email marketing, content marketing, online reputation management, and more.